Hi Jeff,
If all the communications are going through the ACE, you should always see the VIP address in the address bar.
From what you described, it's possible that, at some point the application is redirecting the client to the real address of the server. If that happens, the address bar will change and display the address of the server.
I would recommend you to get a traffic capture on vlan 196 while establishing a test connection from a client, and once you have it, look for HTTP redirects inside the flow.
Daniel